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How to stop the Windows 10 upgrade app (GWX)

There is only a month left now and Microsoft will try their best to force people to move to Windows 10. If you are happy with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, here is how you can prevent the Windows 10 upgrade from starting.

We will use the same trick to stop the GWX app that we used to revive the Classic Task Manager in Windows 8 and Windows 10. As you may or may not be knowing, you can specify a debugger application for every executable file in Windows. It is possible to set it via a Registry key:

Here you can see a list of executable files. It is possible to create the "debugger" value for every file shown in that list.

The "debugger" string value usually contains the full path to the EXE file which should act as the debugger. It will get the full path to the running executable file. We can use this to override the executable file of the GWX app.

About Gaurav Kale

Gaurav is a software enthusiast from India and Classic Shell tester & UX consultant. He started with Windows 95 and is good at software usability testing. He firmly believes that user experience is just as important as software code quality and architecture for software to be successful.

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4 thoughts on “How to stop the Windows 10 upgrade app (GWX)”

Spectre

Unfortunately, I am not upgrading to Windows 10 on my main PC due to its font rendering looking like crap on my monitor. Adjusting Clear type doesn’t help it. Unless Sergey has a trick I don’t know about.

They also changed to a new display scaling method to suit mobile devices better (at the cost of desktops). You can give this a go, but I doubt it’ll fix it. http://xpexplorer.com/windows10_dpi_blurry_fix/